it: explore the Bible from within; allow the Bible to enlarge our culturally bound ideas and, as a result, to bring our ideas into line with itself; and allow our self-knowledge to grow through knowledge of God. These can be supplemented by the general principles of interpretation that Packer advocates elsewhere (see the chapter on “The Bible”). One of the more daring claims that Packer makes is that “the preacher, rather than the critical commentator or the academic theologian, is the true interpreter